The Nexus of the Universe

The nexus of the universe is deep. It’s like those space-time diagrams they always draw and show how Jupiter distorts is more than the Earth. This is the same but it’s what a black hole does - or maybe those coin drop spiral things that were in a lot of malls in the 90’s and now are only seldom seen in science museums. It’s deep and pulls you in and you don’t want to leave, not that your heart ever could.

And it’s different for everyone. And different depending on the year, the month, the day, the season, the moonphase. Although astrology is bullshit which confounds this a bit. The point is that every person alive, whether conscious or not, has a center of their universe, something outside of them that if they could choose they would instantly be transported to. A mountain lake, untouched by civilization. The armpit of the hair tangle of the most urban city - the backalleys and warrens that make up its bone and cartilage. A house on a hill. A chair. A backyard. The crib where smiling, loving faces appear above. The hospital bed that has become the only thing you can remember.

The nexus of the universe is a place, not a person. It’s a romantic notion, but a bastardization of the idea to suggest it could be a person. A limitation of metaphor and understanding. It would sound good in a song but without the rhythm and melody would be exposed as nearly idiotic. Like most lyrics.

There’s a secret trick though, known only to a few. It can be a place within a person’s heart. If you’re lucky enough to find that, you’re cursed enough to know the truth: Bleecker and Thompson will never move. It will never change, at least before you’re able to reacclimate. And it will always exist in your head. But someone’s heart - that changes beat by beat, without any consent of yours. You’re riding a wave, not visiting a corner.

And you have to hope that the barrel carries on long enough that you come out the other side.

Pointless Effort

Where does all the pointless effort go? Things that die without ever giving life to anything else in the world, what becomes of that?

Is there any use in screaming at the onrushing train if nothing you do will stop it? Why do we feel compelled to make the effort? Why struggle against the shackles of the inevitable if it is, indeed, not evitable?

Hope’s a motherfucker. Apathy is worse.

Dead Rat

There is a rat. And a city. And it is dead. The rat, not the city. Look, there are a lot of ways to start this story but I think it has to start with the dead rat, not the city.

This rat is 10 feet from the front door of my apartment building. Just off the pavement and on the asphalt. It’s splayed open and its intestines are falling out, as one does when one is a dead rat.

The first time I encountered the rat I almost stepped on it. After the screaming stopped I forgot about it until I encountered it the next time I came home, albeit with slightly less screaming this time. Slightly. The third time was while I was getting ready to leave my apartment as I wistfully wondered what had become of the rat; who had “taken care” of it. The fourth time was immediately thereafter when I realized that nobody had, and wistfully was not the adjective to use with a rat, perhaps ever.

Whose jurisdiction is it anyway? Apparently not the Sysephean dog piss porters of my building who diurnally hose off the sidewalk. Nor apparently the street cleaners, which…are there street cleaners in Manhattan? Were there? Have there ever been? Maybe that’s just a long lost token of my pre-pandemic life I’m misremembering. Certainly no well-meaning neighbor has stepped in. As the season finally turns to summer and the rat is still there, one recalls Langston Hughes’ deferred dream, and whether or not this was the Metaphor Not Taken.

For a while now New York has been a place where you can walk home at 4 a.m. in a miniskirt through what felt like the entirety of the island without your spidey-sense tingling too much. If it wasn’t fully safe it was safe enough. My favorite activity has and will always be just walking around the different neighborhoods, much like all naturalized citizens of the city obsessed with gatekeeping what it is to be a true New Yorker. But that’s no longer such an easy thing to do - my friends have been attacked on the street multiple times (including one aborted attempt that truly could have killed him) in the recent past, and regardless of how much he has it coming to him none of the people who targeted him knew that. Horrific acts of violence have been visited on innocent denizens of this city in a definite change, a definite break, from the before-times. A walk is no longer a walk, it is a survive.

And while it’s becoming harder and harder to leave your apartment, rent increases are making it harder and harder to stay. Just who exactly is able to move in to New York at this point? Those who want to are too young and priced out, easily. Those with the money for the exorbitant on top of exorbitant prices of the New New York chafe at the inch thick paint on the walls, the retro 70’s appliances (not a design choice), the closet-like apartments with nothing closet-like, the pure stubborn inability for any angle in an apartment to actually be 90 degrees, and the bathrooms that truck stops tell their children about to frighten them. Oh yeah, and the dead rats.

If you’ve been paying attention, this story is about more than just the rat. But it’s also definitely about the rat. It’s about what’s already here, at our doorstep, that we are disgusted and affronted by, and yet when we see nobody has stepped in to take care of the problem we simply complain and write a long essay about it to send to the New Yorker. Real action takes hard work, concerted effort, and leaving your zone of comfortability and privilege aside to actually address what’s going on with tangible steps and actions.

And since I will be so very busy doing that perhaps someone can please just throw away the rat?

Stories

I wonder how many people on any given day, at any given time, are waiting, desperately waiting, for that movie moment. The one where they discover that they’re not a minor character (or god forbid an extra), but that they’re the main hero. That the story has been about them all along and all the threads are being gathered together, and it’s for them.

That the person they’re thinking about is thinking about them too. That the cavalry *actually* arrives. That the last hope doesn’t echo into nothingness but is answered, returned, not in vain, and just in time.

See, the universe doesn’t actually care. There are no stories until after the fact, and we ignore all the moments that don’t lead to a story, that don’t lead to being a main character. And whether or not you ignore them, the weight of all those missed moments eventually wears you down and you carry the heavy burden of knowing that for most of the stories in most of the world, you may not even play a bit part.

And yet we persist. And sometimes we get that moment. And if you’re very, very lucky, you get to make those moments happen for other people.

Stuffies

The question nobody thinks to ask is why a child has a favorite stuffed animal. Not why in general. Not an existential question about the existence of a favorite. No, the question is about that specific animal. What about that specific animal caused the child to choose it above all others.

If the question were ever posed - which is it not - most adults would assume it to be stochastic. Something about the touch. Something about the look. Probably something about how long they had the animal in their possession.

They would be wrong.

What the children sense but adults have long since forgotten is protection. The favorite is the favorite because it best wards off what lurks in the darkness.

This story is not about those children. This story is about children who have no such privilege, no such guardian. It is, in fact, about one specific child, a girl of no more than eight, whose unfortunate lot in life has extended to the fact that she continues to survive, misery increasing on misery, without cessation.

And still. There are the basic facts. There is a child. And there are things that lurk in the dark. And this child, this girl, must face those things that lurk in the dark.

Wisdom

The moments you want to keep will surprise you. It’s not the big ones. It’s not the events, the occasions, the named things. It’s the quiet moments that sneak up on you, tap you on the shoulder when your back is turned, force you to turn around and face them that you wish would last forever. The infinite possibilities and wonder of childhood stretching into adulthood, the esoteric becoming concrete. You walk to the kitchen for a drink and walk back and there it is, slapping you in the face, saying ‘here I am, I will never be again,’ and you mourn and celebrate your loss in the walk back to it. It’s a dirty small apartment where your dreams and aspirations live, not where they come to fruition, that it resides. And it’s there you’ll always want to come back to. You’ll hope to come back to. Your own Valhalla where the brave go when they die.

Wisdom is a funny thing. You must assume it before it is yours, and that is the only way you will ever have it. Take it too early and it burns brightly and then engulfs itself. Too late and the wick cannot catch fire. But always, always, before it is time.

Names

There’s a story my someone I know tells about the origins of his surname. The problem is he is a masterful storyteller. A problem for me, not for him. And not really a problem for me so much as a complaint.

Annoyingly, he is a masterful storyteller without trying. I do not think it is age, for he acts younger than me most days. Nor am I sure it’s the circumstances of his youth - there are plenty in his generation who can barely hold a conversation let alone tell a story. Whatever magic has given him the gift of gab outside of the Emerald Isles is something I am both blind to and covet desperately.

To continue the tangent for just a moment longer, it feels as though something about it is genetic. It isn’t. I know it isn’t. There’s nothing that makes sense about that. But his daughter has the gift as well. Stories come as naturally to her as breathing. For her it manifests as comedy, jokes, jibes, and a lot of cursing. A lot. Maybe too much? But it’s funny.

But back to this crust sea dog. Like most last names, his has a real-life origin. Smith. Weaver. Butt-fucker. Somewhere in the history of the family the moniker was descriptive rather than simply an assignation. His, as I’m told, means silver-smith. Somehow. Somewhere. And in some language.

The story goes something like this. Not like this exactly because I’m not only relying on memory but also I am without the ability to tell this story well. Back in the day one of his ancestors had an unfortunate run of luck, and was cast out of some place. What place? I don’t remember. But they were forced abroad or adrift and eventually had a child who would go to a king in Greenland (maybe - I’m not sure) and prove their worth and the worth of their family and lineage through crafting silver. Thus the name, which I shall not reveal here for want of doxxing, was actually bestowed upon them by the king.

What is the point of all of this story and preamble without facts or coherency? It’s not that he is a great man. Or that his daughter is funny. Or that last names have some sort of root in the history of the family. It’s that there was an ancestor whose only place in history is as a counterpart to the actual story. Who is the negative, the non-named, the creator of the creator of the hero/legacy/known entity.

How awful if ghosts were real and you were simply known as “that one guy who was so bad at his job he got kicked out of the entire country?”

And yet. Yet. That not only happens, it is the fate of many people. To become the sub-ordinate clause in the sentence of history. To become nameless context. To become not an object lesson, but an object itself. Less than a person.

Only time will tell. And as ghosts are not real the import of this fact is up for debate: does one actually care what  generations hence will remember or regard about your life? We are all sparks of stardust and to that we shall return, so what does one care of the memory? Of the fact that the universe is indifferent in every way possible?

No. What you should care about is that telling wonderful stories. And you should treasure that fact. Who cares about the other ones.

Moon

“I love you to the moon and back.”

No, fuck that. I love you Saturn and back. To Jupiter and back. To the roaming asteroids and back. I love you to the ends of the solar system and back. I love you to the fiery furnace of the most distant star, where hydrogen collides with hydrogen and forms the building blocks of not just our galaxy, but the entire universe. I love you to the place where star collides upon star, where nothing but energy can survive. I love you to where a supermassive star collapses on itself, a singularity, a black hole, where even space and time bend to its will.

I love you to the deepest, darkest, coldest depths of the ocean, where giant squids fear to roam and all the bones of all the animals that ever swam the oceans settle into a fine powder, never to be disturbed again.

I love you into the fury of the volcanoes, into the death and destruction the wrought both then and now. I love you into the crushing pressure of stone upon stone for mile, the inescapable grind of the of Earth.

No. Not quite. I love you to the barest atom, the smallest electron, to the the quarks and neutrinos and gluons, to where matter may exist and may not and perhaps everything is probability and math or nothing more than energy. I love to to where time ends and where time began, where matter started and where it will end. I love you there.

I love you into death, through death, and past death. For my love death is barely a whisper upon a desert.

But I don’t love you back. No. My love for you has no return, it has no end. Time may end. Space may end. Matter may end. We will end. But my love for you is boundless, unable to be contained by even the fundamental forces of this universe, or any others.

…but that doesn’t fit as well on a tattoo.

When Death Comes

When Death finally comes I will reach out my hand and hold his, like old friends reuniting.

When Death finally comes I will embrace him, like long lost lovers.

When Death finally comes I will smile, because peace is at hand.

When Death finally comes I will take his hand and pull, turn our embrace into a twist and body slam, and turn my smile into a grimace. I will pull the hood over his empty eye sockets, shoulder check him into the wall, spin him around, and throw his scythe fifty yards in the other direction.

And then? Then I will run for you. Because in this lifetime or the next there is not a power in the universe that I will not fight to get to you.

Diminishings

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that one candle doesn’t lose any light when it lights another. Especially when that first candle is giving all it can to just put out the light it has. Maybe it’s been through a tough week and it’s really pushing for that little bit of light, that little combustion reaction that everyone so oohs and aahs over, the thing that makes it…well, it. And then you have this other candle come along and try to encroach on that light and well, it’s not always clear that not only will nothing be diminished, but if they are together the two candles will actually burn brighter than if they were separate. That’s probably a science fact.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes you need your own space, like from say water. And other times you have no idea what you’re talking about. The trick in life is to figure out which is which.

First Post

It feels like it should be a big deal to write a first post. But I’m also confident that this will be lost to the digital sands of time and is, in the most cosmic sense, irrelevant. Which, if you subscribe to the butterfly effect, is actually super fun. I’ve found some sort of loophole or blind spot where it actually can’t take place.

On the one hand I wish I didn’t draw attention to the fact that this is a first post. Pretend I hit the ground in mid stride. But alas, I need to do this, mostly because I’m completely unsure about the functioning of this site (let alone the formatting, etc.) so I need something to play with. So this is it.

From now on, this is mostly just going to be musings. Snippets of either my thoughts, or stories that I have bits of but nothing else. I’ll make the next post now doing just that. But if anyone does read this, I suppose thank you for being such a masochist that you’re willing to do a deep dive like that. If you ever see me in person and say “quack” I’ll try to find a way to buy you a rubber ducky in return.